Lucille Clifton on Turning Red

Tuesday

My granddaughters, who turn 10, 8 and 6 this year, are excited by the new Pixar film Turning Red, although the youngest girl (along three-year-old Ocean, the only boy) is most enthusiastic about the notion of having a red panda tail that can be waved about. The older two are a bit more attuned to the protagonist’s mood swings although they too are still too young to fully grasp the film’s maturation theme.

For those of you don’t know, the film is about a Chinese American girl who has inherited an ancient family trait. At a certain age, girls transform into red pandas at those moments in life when their emotions spiral out of control—which, for adolescent girls, is pretty much constantly.

The red panda, of course, stands in for menstruation but also for self-expression and self-assertion. One’s inner panda, we learn in the course of the film, can be repressed by a family ceremony where one makes a formal break with that side of oneself. Which is to say, one makes the decision to repress one’s feelings.

As Freud informs us, however, that which is repressed returns as a monster. When protagonist Mei Lee refuses to abandon her panda side the way her mother has, the mother’s inner panda returns in a creature the size of Godzilla. The film’s point is that women should develop a healthier relationship with their red panda sides.

After watching the film, I thought of several Lucille Clifton poems where she wrestles with, and then overcomes, the fear of letting her red panda show. The three I have chosen can be seen as a before, during, and after.

In “the way it was,” the speaker remembers a time when she felt the need to hold things in. While the cultural dynamics for African Americans are different than they are for Chinese Americans, there are resemblances:

the way it was

mornings
i got up early
greased my legs
straightened my hair and
walked quietly out
not touching

in the same place
the tree   the lot
the poolroom   deacon moore
everything was stayed

nothing changed
(nothing remained the same)
i walked out quietly
mornings
in the ‘40’s
a nice girl
not touching
trying to be white 

Clifton was a pioneer among poets about celebrating her inner panda—which is to say, about loudly proclaiming sides of herself that, until she came along, women were supposed to keep hidden. “homage to my hips” is one such poem but, since we’re going with a red theme in today’s post, I share “poem in praise of menstruation.” In this poem Clifton celebrates the “wild” river that returns faithfully each month to the same delta. She also prays that it connects her with animals (including, presumably, red pandas) that are beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave.”

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon          if

there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta          if there

is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain          if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel          if there is in

the universe such a river          if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave  

The last poem, “to my last period,” was written following the poet’s hysterectomy. In it, the poet waves goodbye to her red panda, or at least to one of its manifestations.

well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

Beautiful in retrospect, anyway. But there’s no reason to be ashamed of her.